Theory of mind and emotion recognition skills in children with specific language impairment, autism spectrum disorder and typical development: group differences and connection to knowledge of grammatical morphology, word‐finding abilities and verbal working memory

Loukusa, Soile; Mäkinen, Leena; Kuusikko‐Gauffin, Sanna; Ebeling, Hanna; Moilanen, Irma

doi:10.1111/1460-6984.12091

Cited by 75 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…These results unmistakably challenge the WCC account as an explanation for language problems in ASD and add to growing evidence of this nature (e.g., Brock et al, 2008; Norbury, 2005). As recently discussed for other cognitive accounts, like theory of mind (Gernsbacher & Pripas-Kapit, 2012; Loukusa, Mäkinen, Kuusikko-Gauffin, Ebeling, & Moilanen, 2014), it is increasingly clear that a more accurate and parsimonious account of deceased context sensitivity is that it stems from difficulties with basic aspects of language processing, rather than a cognitive style of decreased context sensitivity specific to ASD.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

Eberhardt

Nadig

2018

Research in Developmental Disabilities

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We present two experiments examining the universality and uniqueness of reduced context sensitivity in language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as proposed by the Weak Central Coherence account (Happé & Frith, 2006, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 25). That is, do all children with ASD exhibit decreased context sensitivity, and is this characteristic specific to ASD versus other neurodevelopmental conditions? Experiment 1, conducted in English, was a comparison of children with ASD with normal language and their typically-developing peers on a picture selection task where interpretation of sentential context was required to identify homonyms. Contrary to the predictions of Weak Central Coherence, the ASD-normal language group exhibited no difficulty on this task. Experiment 2, conducted in German, compared children with ASD with variable language abilities, typically-developing children, and a second control group of children with Language Impairment (LI) on a sentence completion task where a context sentence had to be considered to produce the continuation of an ambiguous sentence fragment. Both ASD-variable language and LI groups exhibited reduced context sensitivity and did not differ from each other. Finally, to directly test which factors contribute to reduced context sensitivity, we conducted a regression analysis for each experiment, entering nonverbal IQ, structural language ability, and autism diagnosis as predictors. For both experiments structural language ability emerged as the only significant predictor. These convergent findings demonstrate that reduced sensitivity to context in language processing is linked to low structural language rather than ASD diagnosis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

Eberhardt

Nadig

2018

Research in Developmental Disabilities

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“…The recognition of emotionally salient stimuli (EA) prompts the generation of an emotional subjective experience and response that need to be regulated so that the affective state and response are contextually appropriate [4]. EA deficits leading to, or at least related to, autism spectrum behaviors and deficient social skills are relevant when considering the presence of cerebellar pathology in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders with impaired emotion recognition [87–89]. The impairment in EA in patients with pure cerebellar disease highlights the potential pathophysiological role of the cerebellum in autism which consistently shows impairments on the RMET and other tasks of emotion recognition [87–89].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EA deficits leading to, or at least related to, autism spectrum behaviors and deficient social skills are relevant when considering the presence of cerebellar pathology in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders with impaired emotion recognition [87–89]. The impairment in EA in patients with pure cerebellar disease highlights the potential pathophysiological role of the cerebellum in autism which consistently shows impairments on the RMET and other tasks of emotion recognition [87–89]. Similarly, patients with Huntington’s disease score lower than controls on the RMET [90], as do patients with schizophrenia who also show impairments in responses to face stimuli on the NimStim Face Stimulus Set [90].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cerebellar Contribution to Social Cognition

et al. 2015

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Emotion attribution (EA) from faces is key to social cognition, and deficits in perception of emotions from faces underlie neuropsychiatric disorders in which cerebellar pathology is reported. Here we test the hypothesis that the cerebellum contributes to social cognition through EA from faces. We examined fifty-seven patients with cerebellar disorders and 57 healthy controls. Thirty-one patients had complex cerebrocerebellar disease (CD); 26 had disease isolated to cerebellum (ID). EA was measured with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RMET), and informants were administered a novel questionnaire, the Cerebellar Neuropsychiatric Rating Scale (CNRS). EA was impaired in all patients (CD p<.001, ID p<.001). When analyzed for valence categories, both CD and ID missed more positive and negative stimuli. Positive targets produced the highest deficit (CD p<0.001, ID p=0.004). EA impairments correlated with CNRS measures of deficient social skills (p<.05) and autism spectrum behaviors (p<.005). Patients had difficulties with emotion regulation (CD p<.001, ID p<.001), autism spectrum behaviors (CD p<.049, ID p<.001), and psychosis spectrum symptoms (CD p<.021, ID p<.002). ID informants endorsed deficient social skills (CD p<.746, ID p<.003) and impaired attention regulation (CD p<.144, ID p<.001). Within the psychosis spectrum domain, CD patients were worse than controls for lack of empathy (CD p=0.05; ID p=0.49). Thus, patients with cerebellar damage were impaired on an EA task associated with deficient social skills and autism spectrum behaviors, and experienced psychosocial difficulties on the CNRS. This has relevance for ataxias, the cerebellar cognitive affective / Schmahmann syndrome, and neuropsychiatric disorders with cerebellar pathology.

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“…2; Students in the ABC design who were unable to provide 3 or more consecutive correct answers on the FBT questions during intervention B were moved to intervention C after session 10, and students in the ACB design who were unable to maintain 3 or more consecutive correct answers to the FBT questions during intervention C were moved to intervention B after session 10. It is worth mentioning that in many research studies the FBTs and intervention close to intervention B of this study were conducted using toy characters and verbal or visual scenarios where students responded to the question by selecting a face or a toy character (Loukusa, Mäkinen, Kuusikko-Gauffin, Ebeling, & Moilanen, 2014;Fisher & Happé, 2005). In this intervention; however, the researchers attempted to create a relatively authentic environment where students with ASD, siblings/peers, and adults were actively involved in the experiment.…”

Section: Procedures and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind Training in Children with Autism: Relating the Shared Attention Mechanism to the Theory of Mind Mechanism vs. Understanding Beliefs Training

Othman¹,

Collet-Klingenberg²

2017

JEDP

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The purpose of this training study was to examine two interventions that aim to improve the performance of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on False Belief Tasks (FBT) which examines the ability to recognize others' mental representation of the world. The first intervention involved drawing connections between the Shared Attention Mechanism (SAM) and the Theory of Mind (ToMM) Mechanism. The second intervention taught belief understanding and the fact that a person's beliefs about propositions may be false or true. To that end, we employed ABC and ACB multiple baselines across subject designs with matched controls. To assess generalization of learned skills, parents or teachers were interviewed. Results suggest that both interventions were effective.

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Theory of mind and emotion recognition skills in children with specific language impairment, autism spectrum disorder and typical development: group differences and connection to knowledge of grammatical morphology, word‐finding abilities and verbal working memory

Cited by 75 publications

References 29 publications

Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

Cerebellar Contribution to Social Cognition

Theory of Mind Training in Children with Autism: Relating the Shared Attention Mechanism to the Theory of Mind Mechanism vs. Understanding Beliefs Training

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